Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/139

Abstract: Ad-hoc networks do not rely on a pre-installed infrastructure, but they
are formed by end-user devices in a self-organized manner. A consequence
of this principle is that end-user devices must also perform routing functions.
However, end-user devices can easily be compromised, and they
may not follow the routing protocol faithfully. Such compromised and
misbehaving nodes can disrupt routing, and hence, disable the operation
of the network. In order to cope with this problem, several secured routing
protocols have been proposed for ad-hoc networks. However, many of
them have design
aws that still make them vulnerable to attacks mounted
by compromised nodes. In this paper, we propose a formal verication
method for secure ad-hoc network routing protocols that helps increasing
the condence in a protocol by providing an analysis framework that
is more systematic, and hence, less error-prone than the informal analysis.
Our approach is based on a new process algebra that we specically
developed for secure ad-hoc network routing protocols and a deductive
proof technique. The novelty of this approach is that contrary to prior
attempts to formal verication of secure ad-hoc network routing protocols,
our verication method can be made fully automated, and provides
expressiveness for explicitly modelling cryptography privitives